Ubuntu wants Ubuntu OS and they want to monetize. I don't think Linux or the open source community is their first priority.

And how is that different from any distribution with a paid option, such as the original two most-well-known distributions in the US - RedHat and Mandrake (now Mageia, but Mandriva before that)?

As soon as money comes into it, it's like it becomes a squabble-fest (at least, among non-RH distributions; RHI itself has their head on straight, despite a semi-fork between RHEL and Fedora) between purists and those that want at least SOME compensation for their hard work.

RE: Windows shells, there are LOADS! I remember playing around with a very nifty one years ago with a bunch of extensions... God knows what it was called, if I find the old drive I could take a look, there was a hack of it and a 64-bit version released and it had extensions etc. so yes, definately not limited to explorer.

the problem with windows shells is, that they are like windows: fundamentally BAD.

Well at the end of the day, no-one is developing gnome2 anymore, it's like using windows 2000, if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it isn't getting patched up.There's MATE but progress on that is very slow.

If there's nothing extra to be supported in drivers...then why is there such a big push to get driver devs to support it?

Also from I read here...it seems to me that Mir and Wayland are basically the same...so I still don't understand why folks are bashing it.

Because even though OpenGL via EGL is "stable", there are drivers that have issues running with it (I think the AMD drivers are better than the Nvidia drivers at it, etc.). And I think Wayland (at least) wants to run via OpenGL ES (Makes it a better fit for mobile, etc.) and only recently have desktop drivers started supporting that well (Browsers also want to use OpenGL ES because WebGL is basically a 1:1 mapping to it, but they currently back it with the full blown OpenGL stack)

So while there is stuff to be supported that isn't, it's stuff that should have been exposed if the drivers were any good, etc.

And it's annoying because Ubuntu decided that instead of helping Wayland, they're just going to do it themselves. Considering they were backing Wayland for a while it seems like they got tired of waiting and decided to just do it themselves (There's a reason the Wayland project is moving slowly, there's a lot of issues to work out, Canonical might get it done faster at the expense of stability, support, etc.)

Well at the end of the day, no-one is developing gnome2 anymore, it's like using windows 2000, if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it isn't getting patched up.There's MATE but progress on that is very slow.

nope. gnome2 is nothing like win 2000. comparing a gui/shell with a whole OS is not serious at all. also why should be gnome 2 developped still? its highly customizable anyway, much more than gnome 3, gnome shell or unity.

I'm talking about in terms of updates, if there's some huge security flaw discovered in windows 2000, it won't be patched.
If there's some huge security flaw in gnome2, it won't be patched (that's not to say there won't be A patch but nothing will be officially released by the gnome team).

I agree it is very customisable, and think even to this day it's an utter disgrace the gnome team removed loads of features from gnome2 in gnome3 such as the ability to specify your own volume step. Why should it be developed still? because it uses GTK2 and not GTK3, it's lacking a lot.

nope. gnome2 is nothing like win 2000. comparing a gui/shell with a whole OS is not serious at all. also why should be gnome 2 developped still? its highly customizable anyway, much more than gnome 3, gnome shell or unity.

I'd actually argue that gnome 3 is more customizable than gnome 2, since its written in javascript and easily extensible.

Anyway, regarding MIR, after reading a lot about this situation I've become rather angry at Canonical's behaviour here.

Basically here's what happened:

Canonical "thoroughly researches" wayland to see if it will fit their needs. Only they failed to get even a basic understanding of how wayland works, and never once reached out or spoke to a single wayland developer. A canonical developer even admitted in the wayland IRC after mir was announced, that they didn't really understand how the wayland input model worked.

Then they start working on MIR in secret. They announce it, with a list of "technical reasons" why wayland is inferior and doesn't fit their needs. This list is very quickly debunked by wayland developers as basically being completely untrue FUD, but Canonical keeps truckin with their pointless new display server, which is a great example of this: http://en.m.wikipedi...n_of_commitment

If they had just come out and said "we made this because we want complete control over our display server", I still wouldn't be super happy about it, but I would understand their justification. Instead they clearly didn't even understand how wayland works, and tried to use a list of totally untrue reasons as to why wayland doesn't work for them as justification.

Anyway, regarding MIR, after reading a lot about this situation I've become rather angry at Canonical's behaviour here.

Basically here's what happened:

Canonical "thoroughly researches" wayland to see if it will fit their needs. Only they failed to get even a basic understanding of how wayland works, and never once reached out or spoke to a single wayland developer. A canonical developer even admitted in the wayland IRC after mir was announced, that they didn't really understand how the wayland input model worked.

Then they start working on MIR in secret. They announce it, with a list of "technical reasons" why wayland is inferior and doesn't fit their needs. This list is very quickly debunked by wayland developers as basically being completely untrue FUD, but Canonical keeps truckin with their pointless new display server, which is a great example of this: http://en.m.wikipedi...n_of_commitment

If they had just come out and said "we made this because we want complete control over our display server", I still wouldn't be super happy about it, but I would understand their justification. Instead they clearly didn't even understand how wayland works, and tried to use a list of totally untrue reasons as to why wayland doesn't work for them as justification.

I agree, it sounds like Canonical disliked the idea of simply being a "contributor" so said "Screw it, we'll make our own display server, with Blackjack, and hookers".

'The Mir specification removed the Wayland criticism and added that Wayland's input event handling has indeed been improved compared to X, plus added some more jargon, and ultimately concluded with: "However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but due to our different requirements we decided to go for the following architecture [with regard] to protocol-integration."'

Well, maybe there's something they're keeping from us? They said key parts will be kept secret, so maybe they have a killer feature up their sleve that Wayland doesn't do, or can do but, it's very slow and unstable? I'm not defending them, I'm just throwing out options.

Well, maybe there's something they're keeping from us? They said key parts will be kept secret, so maybe they have a killer feature up their sleve that Wayland doesn't do, or can do but, it's very slow and unstable? I'm not defending them, I'm just throwing out options.

Or they got caught talking crap about stuff they didn't understand, and now they're trying to save their face with some more made up crap as they scramble to try and create some valid reason in a coding field they have no experience in and that's a very specialized coding field requiring a life time of experience.

Basically they got caught with their pants down as incompetent in this field and they don't want to admit it.

The whole "we have super secret reason" is so obvious you could spot it from mars without a telescope.